The second quake may also have had an additional result: the strange new hill in the woods three miles north of town.
The cone-shaped dirt-and-basalt structure has drawn geologists from all over the state – and some worried comments from townspeople. 'I don't want my children going near it,' says Hannelore Reid, a housewife and mother of six. 'Everybody knows the swamp around there is unsafe.'
Bert Steegler, manager of the Gilead Town Co-operative, is more blunt. 'The woods around there are haunted,' he maintains. 'They always were.'
BUBBLE IN THE EARTH?
Authorities, however, paint a less romantic picture. Describing the formation as the result of 'an immense bubble of methane' – commonly known as 'swamp gas' – Dr James Lewalski of Princeton University's department of geology, contacted by phone, noted that north central New Jersey lies over a recognized geological fault area, the so-called Ramapo Fault, and dismissed the mound as 'a perfectly explainable natural phenomenon,' although he admitted that few such mounds are created with such rapidity and suddenness…
There were other reports, too, that day, in the local press. The tombstone of one Rachel van Meer, who'd died in 1912, had been toppled by the quake and had rolled down the hill to the road, where John and Willy Baber, young men of the town, had hit it the next morning in their pickup truck. The nine-foot-tall granite monument to the Troet family had cracked in two, and a number of graves had been so shaken that at least three wooden coffins were actually left jutting above the ground. "Tis like the Day of Judgment,' remarked Jacob van Meer, whose house adjoined the cemetery.
A man in nearby Annandale had commented that it was 'lucky that the quake hit Gilead,' as it was the only town around without a steeple. A Lebanon man had added, 'It's a good thing those people don't have electricity.' A state legislator for the district had suggested, in a meeting at the local schoolhouse, that the town apply for federal disaster aid and had almost been run out on a rail.
And according to another item, a representative of the U.S. Geological Survey, after visiting the site, had concluded: 'Recent reports of unusual animal behavior in Gilead and the surrounding area may be attributable to preliminary earth tremors leading to this week's disturbances.'
But the people of Gilead didn't see it that way.
To Abram Sturtevant, whose German shepherd had gone wild and had had to be shot; to Klaus and Wilma Buckhalter, whose cow had miscarried; to Adam Verdock, checking the splint on his cow's rear leg, broken when, Wednesday, it had clambered out of its collapsed stall; to Hershel Reimer, repairing the stable door that his horse had kicked down; to Galen Trudel and his son, still searching through the swamp for their missing hogs; to Werner Klapp, burying thirty-seven chickens that had been pecked to death by their fellows on the night of the quake; to old Bethuel Reid, who refused to go outside now without a rake in his hands for fear of serpents; to all of them, the earthquake itself and the animals' unusual behavior were merely two symptoms of the same fundamental disturbance. The one was not the cause of the other; rather, both were portents, signals from above, warnings of divine displeasure. But what, they asked, was He displeased about?
Sunlight amp; grasshoppers: the woods are quiet now. Slept long into the morning, then walked up to the house, scratching groggily. Sounds of Sarr's axe echoing from across the stream. Kitchen deserted; splashed some cold water on my face in the bathroom, gazing longingly at the tub amp; thinking of Deborah's pale lovely body, almost mine for the asking. Over a solitary lunch – mostly store-bought cookies – thumbed through today's Home News. There's some kind of volcanic thing out there in the woods. Must visit.
Felt fat from lunch, amp; angry at the breakdown of my discipline. Ambled down to the stream. Deborah was kneeling in front of it, day-dreaming, amp; I was embarrassed because I'd come upon her talking to herself. I asked her if Sarr had shown any suspicion about yesterday. 'No,' she assured me, 'not even a hint.' She didn't dwell on the subject amp; went back to the house without mentioning it again. I suspect she feels guilty about the whole thing.
Sat by some rocks on the bank of the stream, throwing blades of grass into the water amp; playing word games with myself. The shrill twitter of the birds, I would say, the white birds singing in the sun
… And inexorably I'd continue with the sun dying in the moonlight, the moonlight falling on the floor… The sun's heat on my head felt almost painful, as if my brain were growing too large for my skull. The floor sagging to the cellar, the cellar filling with water, the water seeping into the ground… I turned amp; looked at the farmhouse. In the distance it looked like a picture at the other end of a large room; the carpet was grass, the ceiling was an endless great blue sky. Deborah, in the distance, was stroking one of the cats, then seemed to grow angry when it struggled from her arms; I could hear the screen door slam as she went into the kitchen, but the sound reached me so long after the visual image that the whole scene struck me as somehow fake. The ground twisting into smoke, the smoke staining the sky… I gazed up at the oaks behind me amp; they seemed trees out of a cheap postcard, the kind in which thinly colored paint is dabbed over a black- amp;-white photograph; if you looked closely at them you could see that the green was not merely in the leaves, but rather floated as a vapor over leaves, branches, parts of the sky.. . The sky b urning in the sun, the sun dying in the moonlight, the moonlight falling on the floor… endless progressions that held my mind like a whirlpool. The trees behind me seemed the production of a poor painter, the color amp; shape not quite meshing. Parts of the sky were green, amp; pieces of it kept floating away from my vision, no matter how hard I tried to follow them.
Reality hangs by a thread…
Far down the stream I could see something small amp; kicking, a black beetle, legs in the air, borne swiftly along in the current. Then it was swept around a bend amp; was gone.
By a thread…
Sarr woke me for dinner; I had dozed off, there by the water, amp; my clothes were damp from the grass. I saw scratches on his cheek. As we walked up to the house together he whispered that, earlier in the day, he'd come upon his wife bending over me, peering into my sleeping face. 'Her eyes were wide,' he said. 'Like Bwada's. Like the moon.'
Could he be drinking? No, he didn't smell of alcohol. I said I didn't understand why he was telling me this.
'Because,' he recited in a whisper, gripping my arm,' "the heart is deceitful above all things, amp; desperately wicked: who can know it?" '
Dinner was especially uncomfortable; the two of them sat picking at their food, occasionally raising their eyes to one another like children in a staring contest. I longed for the conversations of our early days, inconsequential though they must have been, amp; wondered where things had first gone wrong.
The meal was dry amp; unappetizing, but the dessert looked delicious – chocolate mousse, a rather fancy dish for people like the Poroths, but which Deborah considers one of her specialties. She took none for herself, explaining that her stomach was upset.
'Then we'll not eat any!' Sarr shouted, amp; with that he snatched my dish from in front of me, grabbed his own, amp; hurled them both against the wall, where they splattered like mud balls.
Deborah was very still; she said nothing, just sat there watching us. She didn't look particularly afraid of this madman – but I was. He may have read my thoughts, because as I got up from my seat he said much more gently, in the normal soft voice he has, 'Sorry,